Queens of the bonkbuster and Aga saga defend the art - and heart - of their fiction

They have been sniped at, belittled and patronised for years by the literary elite, but like the wronged wives of their books, Jilly Cooper and Joanna Trollope, the queens of popular fiction, have had enough.

Cooper and Trollope arrived like avenging angels at the Guardian Hay Festival to put snobs and supercilious critics in their place. And last night the guilty men who once held them up to ridicule were forced to admit they were wrong.

Cooper, whose bonkbuster classics like Polo and Rivals have been compared to towering "knickerbocker glories" with too many characters, too much plot and lashings of sex, said: "There are two categories of writers. Jeffrey Archer and me who long and long for a kind word in the Guardian and the others who get all the kind words and long to be able to do what Jeffrey and I do."

Trollope, whose restrained prose is as elegant as the lady herself, poured haughty scorn on the pretensions of the literary genre, and in particular the "grim lit" the critics seem to adore "that makes you want to slash your wrists".

"I was a judge this year for the Whitbread first novel prize and I read 142 novels in three months. It was enough to put you off reading for life," the author of The Choir and Other People's Children revealed. "Most were unbelievably bad."

An "inherent puritanical strain in the British psyche" was responsible, Trollope claimed, for this "silly" prejudice against popular fiction. Happy endings, or even ones offering a glimmer of hope were considered outré.

"Reading shouldn't be this much fun, we think. Naturally, we are hung up on this, we distrust anything that is readable and fun...Kingsley Amis said it all: 'Novels today are all about women being sad in Fulham.'"

And there was comeuppance too for Terence Blacker, the novelist and commentator who famously labelled her tales of love and betrayal in Middle England "Aga sagas".

"People who are rude about them don't take into account the amount of research I do, which is swotty and immense," she said. "The name itself indicates a provincial cosiness, and is patronising of the readers. A lot of what I write into the books is bleak and challenging but I will be the Queen of the Aga saga to my dying day. It's jolly annoying, but it is better than being the Queen of Hearts."

Blacker, author of the Ms Wiz children's books, yesterday recanted, confessing that he had "felt terribly guilty" about the way Trollope had been haunted by his homely monicker.

"The phrase just stuck I'm afraid. It was early in her career and these tags are rather distorting and unfair. I feel rather remorseful about it now. I am very respectful of her as a writer. She has paid her dues. As she says, it's taken 20 years for her to become an overnight success."

Popular fiction is an easy target, Trollope told an audience at Hay, but it can be the most difficult genre to pull off.

At its best, it has "a capacity to make the trite sound new minted. The human heart hasn't changed, it goes on and on as mores change. We are reportraying the cliches of life and death and sexual betrayal."

And she jumped to her friend Jilly Cooper's defence, saying: "I don't know anyone better read than Jilly Cooper and no one more eager to pretend they are not."

Asked by author Phil Rickman if the difference between their honest-to-goodness genre and self-conscious literary fiction was the same as between masturbation and sex, Cooper declared: "How lovely! Heart is what we are all about, delivering to the readers."

Trollope replied: "We are not writing for grand arcane critics, we are writing for all those dear people who buy [our books]. No one was ever going to ask us to write New Yorker articles after September 11. We are there to talk about people and their problems, real human dilemmas."

And she found an unexpected ally in the critic and novelist DJ Taylor, author of a new book on George Orwell, the paragon of the simple, well-crafted sentence, who managed to be both popular and literary.

"I have to agree with Joanna Trollope," Taylor said, "it is almost literary bad manners to finish with an upbeat ending."

He said it was true there was lots of extremely good popular fiction around, particularly Melvyn Bragg's books set in the Cumbria of his childhood. But Taylor said it was not true that literary authors could not write good bestsellers.

"Carol Birch's new book Turn Again Home is on one level a clogs and shawls northern saga but the writing lifts it high above that category. Pretension is my problem, this idea that it all has to be taken very seriously."

Cooper, however, is packing everything into her next book, the synopsis of which alone made her "cry and cry".

"My new book has got paedophilia, September 11 and lots of black people in it. I'm moving on, we've got to progress."

In it, a reformed cad in the country adopts a little black boy, then gets him a black labrador in a cack-handed gesture to make him feel "more at home".

"We are not writing intellectual fiction but the critics are always saying, 'Poor old Jilly, why doesn't she write something other than bonkbusters.' But when I do something different they slap me down."

So far, the dialogue for her new book - which has political correctness about men not being allowed to look after children in its sights - has been giving her the greatest difficulty. "I've got lots of black East End kids talking, but at the moment they talk like upper-class people in the country."

Taylor though was less complimentary about her work. "Jilly Cooper is an example of a well-known phenomenon that goes back to Hugh Walpole, of people who almost consciously write catchpenny entertainment they know is well beneath them. I can't believe that Jilly doesn't write with her tongue firmly stuck in her cheek."

Life with Tilly and Perdita

Girl From the South by Joanna Trollope

London, Tilly and Henry's flat. Tilly has just broached the subject of inviting Gillon to stay with them.

"Tilly," Henry said, "I thought that the whole point of William going was so that we had the flat to ourselves. I thought that's what you wanted."

"I know," Tilly said. She looked down at the table.

"What's changed? What's happened then?"

"Nothing," Tilly said in a low voice and then, in an even lower one, "that's the point. That's the problem."

Henry came across the room and took hold of her shoulders.

"Why do you want a complete stranger here now? Tilly, what is going on?"

Tilly didn't look up. She muttered something.

"What?"

"Maybe - maybe I need an ally"

"Tilly, you don't even know this girl. You throw wine over her and take her out to supper and then you suggest she comes to live with us?"

Tilly looked up at him.

"Yes. For a few weeks only."

"I do not understand you."

"No."

"Please," Henry said. "Tell me. Explain to me."

Tilly took a step back so that Henry's hands slipped from her shoulders. She said, "I wanted - things to change."

Polo by Jilly Cooper

Queen Augusta's Boarding School for Girls has a splendid academic reputation, but on a sweltering afternoon in June one of its pupils was not paying attention to her English exam.

While her classmates scribbled away, Perdita Macleod was drawing a polo pony. Outside, the scent of honeysuckle drifted in through the french windows. Perdita, gazing out, thought longingly of the big tournament at Rutshire Polo Club where the semi-finals of the Rutshire Cup were being played. All her heroes were taking part: Ricky France-Lynch, Drew Benedict, Seb and Dommie Carlisle, the mighty Argentines, and to crown it, the Prince of Wales.

Fretfully, Perdita glanced at her exam paper which began with a poem by Newbolt:

"And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat," she read,

"Or the selfish hope of a season's fame, but his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote - Play up! Play up! and play the game!"

"Are Newbolt's views of team spirit outdated?" asked the first question. Perdita took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote "Yes" in her disdainful blue scrawl, "the schoolboy in the poem must be an utter jerk and a poofter to boot to prefer his captain's hand on his shoulder to a season's fame and a ribboned coat."

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